CHAPTER 8 PRAGMATICS
B. Type of Pragmatic
3. Conversational Implicatures
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In contrast, work in linguistic pragmatics has attempted to model their actual derivation. Given the need for a cognitively tractable decision procedure, both the neo-Gricean school and work on communication in relevance theory propose a system with fewer principles than Grice. Conversational implicatures typically have a number of interesting properties, including calculability, cancelability, nondetachability, and indeterminacy. These properties can be used to investigate whether a putative implicature is correctly identified as such, although none of them provides a fail-safe test. A further test, embedding, has also been prominent in work on implicatures. The number of phenomena that Grice treated as implicatures would now be treated by many as pragmatic enrichment contributing to the proposition expressed. But Grice’s postulation of implicatures was a crucial advance, both for its theoretical unification of apparently diverse types of utterance content and for the attention it drew to pragmatic inference and the division of labor between linguistic semantics and pragmatics in theorizing about verbal communication.
Conversational implicature is something that is implied in a conversation or left implied in the use of actual language that the way to understand the utterances is following what is expected to hear by the hearer in a conversation (Tsojon & Jonah, 2016). Conversational implicature can occur in the teaching and learning process in the classroom through conversation between the teacher and students. Interactive communication between the teacher and the students in the classroom is very interesting because it makes the learning atmosphere in the classroom communicative and active. The instructions given by the teacher in the learning process can be conveyed indirectly. Since implicature results from indirect meaning delivery, the students might face some difficulties in understanding the meanings of the teacher’s utterances containing implicature. Some students might feel confused to answer the teacher’s utterances that have implicit meanings so that the students cannot understand what is conveyed by the teacher. Some students probably do not have enough knowledge about pragmatics, especially implicature so that misunderstanding in communication between teacher and students is likely to occur in the classroom. If such misunderstanding takes place continuously, it will make learning objectives more difficult to achieve and affect the way students speak. Therefore, the students should understand the meanings of the conversation to make the learning process runs well in the
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classroom. Several previous studies, for example by Zakia (2019), discuss the conversational style of female and male teachers in senior high school. The study found that female teachers can communicate with strategies commonly used by male teachers. The female teachers tended to speak directly when talking to male teachers during school breaks. Another study by Rumahorbo (2016) focuses on how speech acts are realized in communication events in the context of school. It is found that there are two ways of performing speech acts, namely direct and indirect speech acts. The use of indirect speech acts is generally related to the context of time, participants, and politeness so that the intentions of the speaker’s utterances are more difficult to understand.
Implicatures can be determined by sentence meaning or by conversational context and can be conventional (in different senses) or unconventional. Figures of speech such as metaphor and irony provide familiar examples, as do loose use and damning with faint praise. Implicature serves a variety of goals: communication, maintaining good social relations, misleading without lying, style, and verbal efficiency. Knowledge of common forms of implicature is acquired along with one’s native language.
Conversational implicatures have become one of the principal subjects of pragmatics. An important conceptual and methodological issue in semantics is how to distinguish senses and entailments from generalized conversational implicatures. A related issue is a degree to which sentence meaning determines what is said. Historical linguistics traces the evolution of conversational implicatures into idioms.
H. P. Grice developed an influential theory to explain and predict conversational implicatures, and describe how they arise and are understood.
The Cooperative Principle and associated maxims play a central role. Neo- Gricean theories modify Grice’s principles to some extent, and Relevance theories replace them with a principle of communicative efficiency. Problems for such principle-based theories include overgeneration, lack of determinacy, clashes, and the fact that speakers often have other goals. An alternative approach emphasizes that implicatures can be explained and predicted in all the ways intentions and conventions can be. Conversational implicatures are inferences that depend on the existence of norms for the use of language, such as the widespread agreement that communicators should aim to tell the truth, it is for historical reasons that conversational is part of the label. Implicatures
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arise as much in other speech genres and in writing as they do in conversation;
so they are often just called implicatures.) Speakers, writers, and addressees assume that everyone engaged in communication knows and accepts the communicational norms. This general acceptance is an important starting point for inferences, even if individuals are sometimes unable to meet the standards or occasionally cheat (for instance, by telling lies). The inferences called implicatures are ever-present in language use, but, unlike entailments, they are not guaranteed. It could have been wrong in my guess – an implicature – that A did not know quite what had bitten her in the zoo, or over the further implicature that it was an insect that had bitten her. Grice (1975 and elsewhere) identified some of the communicational norms and showed how they are involved in the reasoning that makes it possible for utterances to convey rather more than is encoded in the underlying sentences.